Through all the years, the coupon cutting, working on the house every weekend until her knees ached and her hands were cracked and bleeding, rarely buying anything new for herself—or Walt—off in the distance her fortieth birthday glowed like a distant lighthouse, flashing its beam of rescue. She would turn forty and the money would drop into their account. Most of it would go toward college and some of it would pay down the house loan and all would be, if not completely right with the world, better than it ever had been. She didn’t like to think about the year the girls would go away to college, how she would feel without them, but she did allow herself to think about how things might get a little easier for all of them after The Nest. Finally, the girls could have something that wasn’t about price. They could line up the college acceptance letters and Melody could say, Whichever one you want. Choose. Finally, she could start to relax. Finally, she was going to get a goddamn break.
She turned up the volume on the classical radio station, which she only listened to when her mind was too occupied for lyrics or talk. Occupied was a polite term for the current state of her amped-up brain. If she hadn’t been parked in plain sight on the main commercial strip of their tiny gossipy town, she would have lain down on the front seat and gone to sleep. She was so tired lately. She couldn’t manage more than a few hours at night when she’d involuntarily shift into some kind of exalted state of anxiety. She would be awake for hours, telling herself to get out of bed and brew some tea or run a warm bath or read, but she couldn’t manage to do any of those things either; she would just lie next to Walt, listening to his gentle snore (even when sleeping, he was unfailingly polite), rigid and paralyzed with worry about Nora and Louisa and money and the mortgage and college tuition and global warming and pesticides in food and lack of privacy on the Internet and cancer—God, how often had she microwaved food in plastic containers when the girls were little?—and whether she’d permanently compromised their intelligence by not breast-feeding and what were the repercussions of that one month she’d let them joyfully tear around the living room in hand-me-down walkers from a kind older neighbor until an unkind younger neighbor told her that everyone knew walkers delayed motor and mental development. She’d fixate on what would happen to the girls when they left home and strayed from her watchful eye (What was the range of Stalkerville? How many miles? She’d have to check) and wonder who could ever love and care for them the way she and Walt did, except that lately she felt like a big fat failure in the love and care department. Oh! And she was fat! She’d gained at least ten pounds since the lunch with Leo, maybe more, she was afraid to weigh herself. Everything felt tight and uncomfortable. She’d taken to covering her unbuttoned jeans with long shirts borrowed from Walt; she could hardly afford to buy new clothes. Nora’s coat was looking particularly ratty, but if she bought Nora a new coat, she would have to buy Louisa one, too (it was her rule: parity in all things!), and she definitely couldn’t afford two.
Melody remembered a day long ago when both girls had raging ear infections. Two fevers, two toddlers crying all night who both hated medicine of any kind. As she watched the doctor writing prescriptions, she wondered how on earth she was going to manage to get eardrops and amoxicillin into two cranky, sick babies (four ears, two mouths) three to four times a day for ten days.
“It gets easier, right?” she’d asked her pediatrician then, holding one squirming, sweaty child in each arm, neither one would be put down, not even for a minute.
“That depends on what you mean by easier,” the doctor said, laughing sympathetically. “I have two teenagers and you know what they say.”
“No,” Melody said, dizzy from lack of sleep and too much coffee. “I don’t know what they say.”
“Little kids, little problems; big kids, big problems.”
Melody had wanted to slap the doctor. Having twins seemed so hard when they were little, especially when they were living in the city. Now she found herself wishing for the days when the hardest thing she had to do was dress and load two babies into the unwieldy double stroller and make her way to the playground where she’d sit with the other mothers. They’d all show up with steaming lattes in the winter, iced cappuccinos in the summer, and grease-stained paper bags with various pastries purchased to share. They’d talk and pass bits of lemon cake or blueberry muffins or some gooey cinnamon confection called monkey bread (Melody’s favorite), and the conversation would often turn to life before kids, what it had been like to sleep late, fit into skinnier jeans, finish reading a book before so much time passed between chapters that you had to start from the beginning again, go to an office every day and order out lunch. “Sure I had to kiss a few asses,” one of the women said, “but I didn’t have to wipe any.”